I remember sunlight on my skin. I remember the lilting sinuous music of my homeland, birthplace, place of bones that vibrate in time with mine. I remember all the trees I’ve climbed, and how their sweet sap rises in my veins.

Days of thick clouds, days of numbness, days of sorrow for this heaving earth. ​Still I remember a swirl and flow, an eddy in a stream, a glistening of stones deep beneath the water. I’ve plucked stones like this and seen them lose their magic. I’ve thrown the stones back, back to their water, back to their depth, where they can shine. From this I know the world to have an order, beyond my full understanding, and yet within my ability to contact, at any time.

Do you remember?

Do you know that remembering is beyond what thinking can do? All the senses conspiring to wake us, to unveil the new faculties unfurling in us at springtime. The ability to sing our way back up and out, listening for each other's voices. The ability to dream the future. The ability to feel life-altering desire stirring in a slight thickening of humidity, an air current rising to lift the hairs on the backs of our necks.

This spring I find myself preparing for a great arrival. It feels akin to nesting, as an expectant mother shapes a space in which to nurture her coming child. I’ve been sweeping dust from beneath the radiators, weeding through closets, buffing the windows to shine. I wanna be ready. I know change is coming, I know joy will be birthed through me, though I can’t yet make out the specific beauty of her face. By turns I am bleary-eyed, starry-eyed, ambivalent, passionate. This multiplicity, I know, is the schooling. The tingling sparks, the sense-preparation to welcome what comes.

I sense the faculty of deep memory growing in me: it’s what affords me patience to incubate change, to bide time—not my mind’s time, but the time of mystery, the soul’s time. Deep memory is the inheritance we all carry, and it is the ability to learn ways that may be new to us personally but ancient to existence: ebb and flow, dropping down roots, ripening into fullness, honoring resistance.

​I remember waking in the early hours of morning, the sun yet to rise, the sky indigo with a sliver of silvery moon. Nothing to say. Only to feel that dew-laden air caress my skin, her lush presence. To tip my face skyward: empty, luminous, ready.